


Such a Cunning Disguise

by WhenasInSilks



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel, Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Captivity, F/F, Gaslighting, Grief, Heartbreak, Identity Porn, Mental Instability, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Secret Invasion (Marvel), Self Loathing, Skrulls - Freeform, Sort Of, a faint smattering of Stockholm's Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 22:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17455403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: Carol is fracturing again.Carol and Jess started dating six months before Stamford. Eight months before Captain America died on the courthouse steps. Ten months before things like the measurement of time ceased to be part of Carol’s personal universe.Now she sits alone in the darkness of her cell and feels herself fall apart.A Secret Invasion AU.





	Such a Cunning Disguise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/gifts).



> A gift for the wonderful and talented Ironlawyer! You rock!
> 
> Special thanks to Kastanir and Liara for invaluable brainstorming/alpha-reading help!
> 
> Title is from "I Let Love In," by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Carol is fracturing again.

The room where they keep her is dark—not pitch black, but dark enough to stymy the senses of a baseline human. Which is what she is now, for all intents and purposes, thanks to the inhibitors built into her shackles. Her powers—half of herself—forced under, made dormant. It’s a second kind of blindness. A dark smudge of nothing on a milky sky. The blackness of a star just gone out.

_“You always burned,” Jess said._

_Her breath was rank with sleep, sour as the sweat pouring from Carol’s skin, but her body was warm, her heartbeat steady where it pulsed next to Carol’s, breast against breast._

_The dream still crowded at the edges of Carol’s consciousness. Bare hands clutching at her face. The flash of teeth—Rogue smiling as she drained Carol dry. This was what it felt like, dying in darkness while the city slept below. She’d been unconscious by the time Rogue threw her off the bridge, but she still dreamed about it. The fall. The black waters below._

_“I should’ve died,” Carol whispered to the night, the horror of it still fresh in her throat. “I_ did _die. If you hadn’t— If—”_

_And then Jess was climbing on top of her. Her elbows and knees were sharp and her voice was sharper still, but her hand was surprisingly gentle as it tangled in Carol’s hair, tilting her head back until there was nowhere else to look, nothing to see but her lover’s face._

_“Hey. None of that, okay?” A thumb smoothed the wrinkles from her brow. “You were so bright, you know? Even then. If we relived that night a thousand times I think I’d always find you.”_

_Carol scoffed and tried to roll away but the hand in her hair held her fast, green eyes holding hers where they gleamed, catlike and luminous out of the darkness._

_“It’s just you, Carol. I was in the dark for so long, but you. You shone.”_

Now Carol sits on the floor and tilts her head against the wall of her cell. Her arms are wrapped around her chest, like she can physically hold herself together.

 _Well, Jess,_ she thinks. _Am I shining now?_

She wonders which Jess she’s talking to. The one who spoke those words? The one who saved her all those years ago? Or the one from the propaganda films they show her, tall and quiet, picking her way through the rubble of earth’s fallen cities as black-capped warriors scurry around her feet?

She wonders if she knows which of those Jesses is which, anymore. If she ever knew.

She wonders if she’s cracking up again.

If she ever stopped.

* * *

She doesn’t know how long they’ve held her for.  

When she first awoke inside the cell, her captors told her they’d taken Earth, that the planet and all its inhabitants had been claimed, through ancient right and by right of conquest, by the Skrull Empire and its Glorious Queen, in His Holy Name. They showed her videos of battlefields. Her friends dead or dying or in chains. Earth’s cities in flames. You belong to us now, they said. Swear allegiance, they said, and we will show you mercy. Carol laughed in their faces.

That was then.

These days visits are few and far between. Her captors scrupulously avoid any indication that time is passing. Even her food arrives at irregular intervals, so she can’t measure the days that way. That wouldn’t have been a problem, once. Once upon a time the pulse and flare of the power within her was the ticking heart of the universe. Now she sits in the darkness, flimsy in her unadorned humanity, and feels time slough away from her, memories peeling back into fractals, a recursive decay that bares her to the bone. The story of her life splayed across the floor, her faults and failures in endless recurrence.

Read here the life Carol Danvers: a candle flame that thought it could be a star, a fire that burned until it burned itself out. For all her stubbornness, all her ambition and determination, all her _rage,_ she’s never been strong enough to protect herself: not from the Kree, from Marcus, from Rogue, from the Brood. How did she ever imagine she could be strong enough to protect the people she loves?

It’s a terrible thing, love. It’s almost like being an alcoholic, the way it collapses your identity, focuses your whole world around a single object, one solitary, burning need. Tony Stark gave up his suit and his empire for a drink. Carol gazed upon frame after frame of familiar corpses and choked down the horror and told herself it didn’t matter, that none of it mattered, that they’d regroup, fight back, rebuild, _so long as she’s safe, so long as—_

And then the video feed flickered out and the door was sliding open, and all around her, her captors were falling to their knees—“my lady,” they murmured, reverent as a prayer, “my lady”—and in the doorway—

That’s what she dreams about, these days, that moment of recognition seamlessly grafted into any one of a hundred memories, of a thousand. Jess battling at her side, or scowling across the breakfast table (she never was a morning person), or swinging out the window after a fight, or smiling, or laughing, or leaning in for a kiss—and then everything stops as Jess’s gaze meets hers, eyes darkening as green blooms like algae over the fairness of her skin.

“Hello, lover,” Jess says, night after night, and the worst thing is it’s not a taunt. It’s not a taunt at all, and Carol—

Not everything is fixable. Sometimes something breaks so many times, in so many different ways, that there’s no way to put it back together again. Look at Cap and Tony, that whole mess of a civil war.

Look at Carol.

_Hello, lover._

Alone in the darkness, Carol gives in to the only freedom she has left, and breaks, and breaks, and breaks…

* * *

_Carol is laughing. “I really fucking love you, you know that?”_

_Beside her on the couch, Jess freezes, and a moment later, as she realizes what she’s said, Carol follows suit._

_“Wow,” Jess says. “Seriously?”_

_Now Carol’s panicking, because she didn’t mean to— They’ve only been dating for two and a half months, and it’s too soon, of course it’s too soon. This is her problem. She always wants things, too much too fast and maybe that’s a good trait for a woman trying to muscle her way up through the ranks of the US Airforce but you can’t Sheryl Sandberg_ lean in _to a committed relationship, Carol, Jesus—_

 _“Cartoons and sugary cereal,” Jess is saying. “That’s all it takes? God, you’re easy,” and now Carol is starting to get mad, she doesn’t mean to but she doesn’t_ do _embarrassment well, she never has—_

_She starts to rise from the couch, but Jess grabs her back down. “Wait, I’ve got something to tell you.”_

_“I’m not in the mood.”_

_“No, it’s important,” and Jess is wriggling closer, her eyes wide and solemn. “I really,” she says, and brushes a kiss over the knuckles of Carol’s left hand. “Fucking,” she adds with relish, and drops a second kiss to Carol’s right. “Love— Will you stop laughing? I’m trying to make a declaration!”_

_And then they’re kissing properly, limbs tangling on the narrow couch. “I love you,” Jess says, and “I love you,” Carol echoes, back and forth, again and again, until Carol scarcely knows who’s speaking, until she can no longer tell where her body ends and Jess’s begins…_

It’s Carol’s worst memory, now.

She knows the Skrulls had been infiltrating Earth for at least a year by the time they struck. She knows the Skrull empress was part of the first wave of invaders. (“Our noble queen,” one particularly irritating piece of agitprop proclaims, “relinquished her royal position _—_ her own true form! _—_ that not even the first of her children should enter this new world alone.”)

Carol’s done the math.

She and Jess started dating just after Jess joined the Avengers. Six months before Stamford. Eight before Captain America died on the courthouse steps. Ten before things like the measurement of time ceased to be part of Carol’s personal universe.

She never kissed Jess. Not that day on the couch. Not ever. She never told her she loved her.

And now she never will.

* * *

Carol wakes to the sound of the door opening.

Jess steps into the cell. She’s backlit by the glare from the hallway, so Carol can’t see her face, but she recognizes the silhouette, the lean, lithe lines of Jess’s body, the scent of Jess’s pheromone-canceling perfume. It smells like woodsmoke and citrus. Like an orange grove in flames.

“Oh, Carol,” Jess sighs, and the sound is so familiar it raises goosebumps on the back of Carol’s arms. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”

There’s a tinge of humor in her voice, like she’s inviting Carol to share a joke.

Carol says nothing.

Jess sighs again. “I hate seeing you like this. You were going to be the best, do you remember that? You were going to be the person other people strive to be. That’s what you told me.” She clicks her tongue. “Yet here you sit. Wasting away, day by day.” Her voice is sad and chiding and fond all at once. Carol tastes bile in the back of her throat. She can’t distinguish the taste these days from the taste of longing. She’s not sure there ever was a difference.

She shifts in her shackles as the other woman approaches, but doesn’t pull away, not even when Jess bends down, leans in close. Slides her arms around Carol, holding her close but gently, like she’s fragile, like she’s something to be treasured.

Carol bites back the words that rise unbidden to her tongue.

It doesn’t matter. Jess speaks them anyway, whispers them into Carol’s ear. Just one more thing she’s stolen.

“I’ve missed you.”

A hand creeps up her back, coming to cup the back of her neck, to rake its fingers through the hair at Carol’s nape. Carol tries to ignore the inhuman coolness of the other woman’s touch, the rough-smooth pebbling of scales dancing against Carol’s all-too-human skin. Tries to let herself pretend, if only for a moment.

“My love,” the false Jess breathes, and Carol can’t suppress a shudder.

“I know,” the other woman continues, “you’ll come to see things our way. I have faith in the rightness of His plan.” Her words are edged with the ardor of the fanatic, but otherwise calm, otherwise even. The words of a woman content to wait. A hand lifts to stroke Carol’s cheek. “He loves you. So very much.”

It sounds like a declaration.

Finally, the other woman pulls away. She’s halfway across the room before Carol can bring herself to speak.

“Veranke.”

It’s the first time she’s ever said the name out loud. It stops the other woman in her tracks. Then, as Carol watches, she rolls her shoulders back and turns, and now she doesn’t look like Jess anymore, even in the half-light. Jess never stood like that in her life. Like a queen. A monarch to a supplicant.

Carol takes a breath and forces herself to continue.

“Jess,” she says, voice rusty from disuse, “is she— is— did—” The words gutter like a candle flame and go out. _Is she okay? Is she alive?_

_Did she suffer?_

The Skrull queen stands very still. Finally, she speaks.

“We have been waiting,” she says, “a very long time, to take back what is ours.” There’s a light in her eye: pity or triumph, Carol can’t tell. It doesn’t really matter either way.

Carol’s pulse is pounding in her throat. Worlds hang in the balance of the Skrull queen’s next words. It’s strange, Carol thinks distantly. She hadn’t known she could still feel like that. Like she had something left to lose. Because maybe she never held Jess in her arms, never made love to her, never got into screaming fights about the right way to do laundry, never brought her wonton soup from the Chinese takeaway when she was sick, never had the opportunity to _love her_ , but if Jess is alive, somewhere in the universe—Carol’s nails cut crescents into her palms, _just let her be alive_ —if Jess is okay, then— Then maybe—

Veranke’s voice is almost kind.

“What makes you think,” she says, “there ever was a Jessica Drew?”

**Author's Note:**

> Baby's first femslash! Maybe next time I'll be brave enough to write the Carol/Veranke femdom angst-fest my soul craves, but for now, happy Fandom Stocking to all and to all a good night!


End file.
